Armour house rule

[Evening]

In my games I houseruled damage too, and on average it's higher than RAW. I refrained from writing them here to avoid a wall of text

Can you post your houseruled damage?

[Evening]

@looping:
I use the armour's malus to tn...
-On fatigue rolls, alway: basically they are Travel rolls and sometimes Athletics (as the forced march in Kinstrife).
-On other athletics rolls I judge case by case, 'cause armours were made to keep freedom of movement... yet all that weight wasn't without consequences (think about climbing, let alone swimming).

For swimming I give a TN+4 penalty if you're swimming more than 20-25 feet in mail hauberk. It's less for the other armours. And +4 is generous considering all the other gear they are usually carrying (shield, weapons, and other miscellaneous odds and ends).

-About stealth I'm on the fence.
On one hand chain armour was far more confortable to wear than we usually expect, while leather armour was fairly creaking.
On the other hand "realism" is secondary to playstyle, to me: my actual group is 4 barding "knights", all decked in chainmail. They are already unsubtle enough as they are, if I penalize stealth I limit their gaming possibility (ie, I want them to use stealth sometimes!).
If I got a different fellowship probably I would give the malus to stealth as you suggested, to encourage diversity in the group.

You're so right about creaking leather armour. I always assume that if someone other than an elf is really trying to move around stealthy, they aren't wearing anything more than clothes and soft leather. Soft leather doesn't have a Protection rating. It keeps you warm, protects you from minor cuts and abrasions, and that it.

[Corvo]

In my games I houseruled damage too, and on average it's higher than RAW. I refrained from writing them here to avoid a wall of text

Can you post your houseruled damage?

I'll try to be as concise as possible (edit: I failed )

My players complained a bit about Body being not so useful. And they kept forgetting how to calculate damage for great/extraordinary success: instead of adding body or body•2 to base damage, they simply doubled or tripled base damage. Time after time.
I decided that I cannot change my players brain, but I can change the rules.

In my houserule damage is based on PC's Body.
Hand weapons (raw damage 5): base damage = body
Hand and half weapons (raw damage 7): base damage = body+2
Great weapons (raw damage 9): base damage=body+4
Dagger base damage=body-2, to a minimum of 2.
Short sword I houseruled a bit differently: same damage as a knife, but same wounding power of a sword. But that's just my idea of a short sword

When you score a great success you simply double your damage. When you score an exceptional one you triple it.

The average damage output is greater. Dwarves and Beornings in particular become fearsome. But once you deduct armour from every blow, the average is pretty much the same (I add some endurance to NPC, but it's just me giving the PCs a tougher time).

In game we found out that low skill fighters struggle against armour (they rarely got tengwars), while skilled ones can bypass it with stronger blows. And a Body 7 fighter with a great weapon is pretty terrifying (damage potential 11-33!), regardless of armour.

And that bring in the third part of my houserules: parry being a skill roll. This way a skilled fighter can eschew armour, while being weary makes you an easier (if tougher) target.
I wrote these rules elsewhere in some thread, if someone is interested I can write them here.

[Corvo]

I am not in favour of the reduction damage house rules. I like more the ones proposed by (can not recall the name) where after a battle a PC recovers extra endurance = 2xProtection dice of the armour, in a similar way as the helm does if you remove it.

In any case, I understand people want to make armours more relevant during combat. Why not just then reduce ALL weapons (PC and NPC) pierce value by 1?

Cheers,
Yepes

Lowering the edge can be a solution. We just have to ask Elfcrusher to implement it on his simulator to have some numbers to chew (hint hint)

[Michebugio]

The main ways to kill a Hero are: 1- coup the grace once he's unconscious (by Endurance or Wound loss, it's the same). 2-wound him for the second time AND cancel his Endurance in the same blow. Wounds alone cannot kill a hero, nor Endurance: you need both.
On the other hand normal enemies are considered dead once they got 1 wound or zero endurance.
Wounds or Endurance are the same here.
And then... we got Trolls, where Wounds are REALLY the only physical damage. What can I say? 2 out of three is fairly good, and no theory is perfect
Joking aside, we are talking about gaming tools, not medicine, so I think we need some compromise.

Good reasoning Corvo, but look at my correction in bold: you always need a second Wound to risk death, while you are never at risk of dying straight out by Endurance damage alone (you can drop unconscious exposing yourself to a coup de grace, but that's another matter). This is a simple evidence that Endurance and Wounds are never exactly the same: Wounds is what can kill the player, Endurance can at worst "spare a coup de grace" to your opponent when he manages to wound you twice. To conclude, I will again quote Elfcrusher:

Heroes have exactly two hit points, and you lose one per wound.

But this can be a good starting point to expand game mechanics

[Corvo]

The main ways to kill a Hero are: 1- coup the grace once he's unconscious (by Endurance or Wound loss, it's the same). 2-wound him for the second time AND cancel his Endurance in the same blow. Wounds alone cannot kill a hero, nor Endurance: you need both.
On the other hand normal enemies are considered dead once they got 1 wound or zero endurance.
Wounds or Endurance are the same here.
And then... we got Trolls, where Wounds are REALLY the only physical damage. What can I say? 2 out of three is fairly good, and no theory is perfect
Joking aside, we are talking about gaming tools, not medicine, so I think we need some compromise.

Good reasoning Corvo, but look at my correction in bold: you always need a second Wound to risk death, while you are never at risk of dying straight out by Endurance damage alone (you can drop unconscious exposing yourself to a coup de grace, but that's another matter). This is a simple evidence that Endurance and Wounds are never exactly the same: Wounds is what can kill the player, Endurance can at worst "spare a coup de grace" to your opponent when he manages to wound you twice. To conclude, I will again quote Elfcrusher:

Heroes have exactly two hit points, and you lose one per wound.

But this can be a good starting point to expand game mechanics

You are a tough costumer, but thank you for the good reasoning thing
As I wrote, that argument was already tricky: Great size opponent need some wounding to be felled. So it's not a two-out-of-three argument as I said, but a 1.5-to-1.5.
Well, back to my main course: can my Mountain Troll argument sway you?
(I feel like a restaurateur trying to impress someone from the Michelin guide )

[Rocmistro]

I disagree with Elfcrusher's comment "Heroes have exactly 2 hit points", on the grounds of an analogy to what I suspect is D&D that he's referring to.

In D&D Hit Points are the combination of (Endurance + Wounds). What makes D&D suck is that hit points are ALWAYS the buffer to killing someone, and you always (with normal weapon damage anyway), have to burn through them before you kill someone. Do you really think a level 10 fighter with 80 hit points can be "hit" with a longsword 8-12 times with the bladed edge of the thing (drawing blood and piercing organs) before he goes down? Even in D&D those hit points are meant to be an abastraction of some kind of combination of stamina loss, confidence loss, the will to fight, bruises, minor lacerations and/or deep piercing strikes that threaten life.

Let's not overthink this; Hit Points in D&D are pretty much analagous to Endurance in TOR. if you really feel the need to carry the parallel further, I would suggest that the "Staggered" condition in D&D (0 hit pts) is something like having 1 wound and being wearied in TOR, and unconscious in D&D (at -1 to -9) is having 2 wounds in TOR and/or being unconscious.

Not that D&D's system of modeling damage and health is a particularly good baseline for attempting any further tweaking in TOR, but there you have it.

In TOR (or D&D), if you broke a finger while in combat (perhaps the flat of your opponent's blade hits your hand while parrying), you would not suffer a wound at all; there is absolutely nothing life-threatening about it. It would nevertheless lower your resolve to fight, hurt like hell, and it would start a series of changes in your body that would lead to lowering your chances to win. In fact, you could break all 10 fingers, and all 10 toes, and your cheekbone, jaw, collarbone, as well as a rib or two, and you would still not be wounded. All of these are examples of Endurance Loss. Other examples of endurance loss could be lifting your shield arm to take a blow on the shield so that it does not hit your torso, and getting a massive bruise/welt on your arm instead of taking a blade in the guts, as well as jumping out of the way of troll's hammer before it thuds into your head.

And in all of these examples except the last, the damage would be mitigated by having worn armor. But that is why it's called damage reduction, and not damage negation.

Damage received is totally proportional to weapons wielded, and so we must reason that the acting agent of delivering the damage is not the effort on the part of the offended to get out of the way, but rather in the amount of kinetic force dealt by the incoming weapon. In other words, the fact that a dagger yields 3 damage and a great spear yields 9 damage should squash any claims that endurance damage has more to do with the attacked party spending endurance (ie, stamina) to avoid the blow. No; taking endurance damage means you got hit. (At least most of the time; there are certainly scenarios where it makes sense to interpret the attack's damage as being an expenditure to get out of the way, like avoiding a falling 10 ton falling rock trap or something like that).

And so, if the basic representation of "endurance damage" is physical contact and/or weapon impact (with a lesser percentage of the definition given as "burst movement which allow the attacked party to avoid the blow) that does not result in life-threatening injury, then I really don't see what is so controversial about having certain armor always give a minor mitigation factor (ie, DR) to incoming blows.

[Michebugio]

I think you've just obtained an extraordinary success on your Persuade check, Rocmistro

[Glorelendil]

Rocmistro: I'm not disagreeing with you about HP. I did not mean "D&D Hit Points", which are a combination of health and endurance. I meant "Meat Points".

As for the part about weapon damage, that has occurred to me, and to some extent one simply has to admit that game mechanics might not model reality. But to offer a counter-rationale: think of endurance as a kind of poetic "luck" pool, of the sort that only fictional heroes have, and we have to spend from that pool in order to avoid bad things. Getting hit by a great axe is so much worse than getting hit by a dagger that we have to spend more of our luck to achieve it.

Corvo: I don't think we do need a "compromise", but I don't mean that antagonistically. My view is that damage is not physical and thus can't be mitigated, and any slackening of that belief is essentially abandoning it.

On the other hand, I do agree that armor rules could stand tweaking such that heavier armor maths out better, and might even grit my teeth and accept the DR rule simply to make that happen. (By the way: my idea was to add an Armor Skill, which would compete for XP with weapons, valour, and wisdom, where each point of skill reduces the effective encumbrance of armor by X, to a minimum of zero. This would work great in Angelalex's campaign. /wink)

At some point I will add to the simulator an option to reduce all edge values by 1 (who gets credit for that one) although you can do this manually already, at least for the Hero, by selecting "Keen".

[Corvo]

@Elfcrusher
Don't worry, your posts don't feel "antagonistic". Hope mine too. I'm happy we can chat about mechanics, and all that chatting is only possible because you realized that simulator.
Before your hard data I was feeling that armour was weak, now we know that it's detrimental to victory. That's a bug.
We all agree that the game is great, and that there is a bug that need to be solved. Everything else is just houserules, and it's impossible to have 100% consensus on such matters*. But we can exchange ideas

Heck, after a century we cannot agree if .45 is better than 9mm! (Wink at firearms enthusiasts) :p